Money in Politics

On Friday, the most sweeping anticorruption legislation since the Watergate era passed through the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 234-193. This democracy reform bill, otherwise known as H.R. 1 or the “For the People Act,” has multiple aims: to ensure that our voting and electoral systems are protected and satisfy the “one person, one vote” principle; to crack down on rampant corruption and kleptocracy in Washington; and to reduce the role of corporate money in politics. Among other reforms, the bill calls for an end to gerrymandering, more transparent and open government requiring corporate disclosure of political spending, and partial public financing of elections to lessen the power of the ultra-wealthy donor class in determining who wins elections in U.S. politics.

To the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, this bill essentially means a disruption in the established way of doing business in Washington—the status quo in which the Chamber and its corporate cronies have outsize influence over who gets elected and what legislation is passed. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the Chamber sent out what it called a “Key Vote Alert!” to all House members shortly before the vote was scheduled to take place, urging them to vote no on this bill that is vital to repairing our democracy. As the largest lobbying entity in the United States and a prodigious campaign spender, it is no surprise to see the Chamber sticking its head out on such an ambitious bill that would drastically reduce the influence of corporate money in politics.

While the bill passed through the House despite the Chamber’s protestations, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has stated he does not intend to bring the bill to a vote on the Senate floor, on the flimsy grounds that “I get to decide what we vote on.” Nevertheless, H.R. 1 is expected to be introduced to the Senate later this month, and sufficient public pressure to pass this wildly popular bill could force McConnell into conceding that withholding these sorely needed reforms from even getting a vote is an untenable position. You can bet your bottom dollar—and every other dollar you have—that the Chamber will be hard at work to keep McConnell from letting the American people’s representatives in the Senate have a say in whether or not it passes—so as to protect the millions of dollars it invests to try to sway elections.

In the text of the alert the Chamber sent to House members before the vote, the Chamber claims that American democracy “benefits from the robust participation of its citizens — whether they choose to engage individually at the ballot box or collectively through a party, association, or corporation.” By referring to corporations in the context of “citizens,” the Chamber is invoking the notion of supposed “corporate personhood.” Notably, the Chamber also recoils at the idea that the bill would “have the practical effect of prohibiting associations, corporations, from engaging in the political process.” This is an uncharacteristic instance of the Chamber, usually careful to keep up the charade that it exists primarily to benefit small businesses, “saying the quiet part loud.” The Chamber exists to promote the interests of corporations and the ultra-wealthy, but rarely does it admit to such so blatantly.

The reality is that voters do not believe that corporations are people and believe that corporations have “too much power” over politicians. By claiming that corporations have some unassailable right to a voice in our politics—which, due to the massive amounts of money corporations and their representative associations like the Chamber pour into lobbying and political advertising, inevitably drowns out the political voices of average Americans—the Chamber is making an argument that the public fundamentally disagrees with in an effort to convince the very same lawmakers whose coffers it lines that they benefit from the present system.

Elsewhere in the alert, the Chamber argues that H.R. 1 would place unreasonable burden on the kinds of “issue ads” (effectively, campaign ads in disguise) corporations are allowed to air. Likewise, it claims that the bill’s requirement that organizations must disclose communications with candidates or elected officials is “onerous.” This is clearly a bad-faith argument; the Chamber knows full well which of its “issue ads” should rightfully be considered campaign ads, and the disclosure requirement is a very simple way of shining sunlight on who is really funding the ads and potential conflicts of interest held by our elected officials. But as per usual, the Chamber paints itself as the put-upon victim of some overly harsh punishment rather than the truth—that it is a massive spender in American politics and it simply wants to maintain the status quo where it can safely influence elections and legislation out of public sight.

Luckily, the fate of H.R. 1 is not pre-ordained. No matter how much Sen. McConnell and the U.S. Chamber may want to deny the people the right to the kinds of reforms to our broken political system that they desperately want and need, they do not hold all the cards. By urging your senator to co-sponsor the bill when it is introduced in the Senate later this month, and to publicly demand that McConnell bring the bill to the floor for a vote, we can show that our democracy really is “for the people”—and no, “the people” does not include corporations.

If you have followed Chamber Watch for long, you are intimately familiar with the reactionary, anti-democratic agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As the nation’s largest lobbying group, the Chamber is the poster-child for the toxic influence of moneyed interests in our system. As the largest spender of secret money on political advertisements, the Chamber ensures that the public remains unaware of who is funding it, allowing its billionaire donors to remain in the shadows while pouring unfathomable sums into our broken campaign finance system. And by bullying opponents into submission with overwhelming capacity for corporate litigation, it plays a key role in hindering government efforts to impose and enforce commonsense safeguards and reforms protecting consumers, workers and the environment.

The Chamber is a key bad actor, but it is not the only anti-democratic force in our system today. Our democracy is in crisis because of the influence of the corporate behemoths and billionaire donors on officials in power. The nexus between moneyed interests and office-holders has resulted in profoundly broken institutions that fail to protect average Americans the way they are meant to.

From voter suppression to open defiance of the rule of lawto unchecked ethical violations, American democracy is under a constant onslaught of attacks. The power of special interests in politics have been wreaking havoc on our democracy for decades, resulting in a nation where average Americans have very little say over the direction the country is headed in and which policies are being enacted.

But thankfully, a new coalition of over 100 organizations inside and outside Washington, representing a diverse range of issue areas and constituencies, has emerged to confront the monstrosity of corporate moneyed influence. The member organizations individually advocate for a number of different issues, but all of them commonly recognize that the only way to move forward on their particular issues is to start with foundational, systemic reforms. This coalition, the Declaration for American Democracy, made its formal debut via a press conference on October 30. Now, following the midterm elections, the Declaration for American Democracy is committed to advocating for a large number of top-to-bottom reforms to address America’s crisis of democracy, starting with demands made of the 116th Congress.

The basic demands of the Declaration for American Democracy are:

Our democracy must ensure the freedom to vote and have that vote counted.

Our democracy must be honest.

Our democracy must have meaningful participation.

Our democracy must provide transparency into our government and our elections.

Our democracy must be responsive.

The U.S. Chamber is a massive wrecking ball, bringing destruction to our democracy through its multipronged efforts of lobbying, secret money campaign finance spending. It and other groups representing massive corporate and billionaire funds have caused tremendous damage to our democracy.

But it is not too late to repair our democracy, and bolster its foundations to prevent this kind of crisis from ever arising again. By following the Declaration for American Democracy and supporting its efforts, you can take action to demand much-needed structural reform to our system. This is our democracy—not the U.S. Chamber’s, nor wealthy donors’. It’s time we reclaim it.

It’s a basic foundation of a democracy: voters need accurate information about candidates in order to fulfill their civic duty in casting their ballots. But increasingly, it seems that this tenet may no longer hold true in the United States. Not only is our campaign finance system built in a way that prioritizes the voices and opinions of extremely wealthy donors at a far disproportionate rate to average Americans, but nowadays, much of the nation’s political contributing is done in the shadows.

Since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010, the political donor class has begun funneling their money through non-profit organizations that can effectively make it impossible to trace since they do not need to disclose their donors. These organizations range from so-called “social welfare” organizations that are truly just a way to create political advertisements without disclosing who paid for them to trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which engage in largescale political activity yet likewise do not disclose their donors.

In fact, the Chamber is perhaps the single most active participant in this secret money sham. In Issue One’s new report, “Dark Money Illuminated,” the researchers find that between 2010 and 2016, the Chamber spent approximately $130 million on political advertisements—the most of any organization. It’s such an enormous total, in fact, that it accounts for roughly 1/6th of all political advertising spent by all secret money groups in that timespan. The Chamber is no stranger to massive election spending. As Public Citizen has previously reported, the Chamber spent about $30 million on the 2016 election cycle alone—and 100 percent of its spending was to benefit Republican candidates.

And while we could make educated guesses as to who funds the Chamber—the Koch Brothers’ massive far-right donor network has extensive ties to the Chamber, for example—the reality is that the organization’s lack of donor disclosure makes the source of its vast sums of political spending money untraceable. Public Citizen has found that in 2014, the Chamber reported 1,536 donations of $5,000 or greater, with the top 74 donors giving contributions of $500,000 and up, providing 57 percent of all its contributions for that year. Similarly, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, the arm of the Chamber dedicated to restricting consumer access to the courts and lobbying against more aggressive prosecution of corporate crimes, received 99 percent of its total contributions in 2014 from only 99 donors. It’s clear that a tiny number of extremely wealthy donors are funding the Chamber, which is in turn engaging in unparalleled levels of political spending. And all of it is happening in the dark.

Unless serious reforms are made to our campaign finance system, the Chamber and other secret money groups can continue to bend our campaigns and public policy further toward the interests of the extremely wealthy using deep coffers of untraceable dollars. What sorts of reforms could be made?

One important change would be issuance of clearer guidelines setting the boundaries of what sorts of political activity different types of nonprofits are allowed to engage in—with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s vague “facts and circumstances” approach proving wholly inadequate. Public Citizen’s Bright Lines Project proposes the completion of a Treasury and IRS rulemaking, as well as various regulatory and legislative solutions to the problem of vague definitions of political activity.

Furthermore, Congress has various legislative solutions at its disposal. It could pass the DISCLOSE Act so that secret money groups like the Chamber are required to disclose the sources of the funds behind campaign ads on traditional media, such as TV, radio and print. It could also pass the Honest Ads Act, which would provide more transparency for campaign ads on the internet. Similarly, the Federal Election Commission (FEC)’s proposed rulemaking on disclosure of funding for internet advertisements should contain robust protections to ensure that voters know who is behind the advertisements they see. The FEC is also roiled in partisan deadlock, and substantial changes should be made to the agency’s structure to reduce its dysfunction and make it a more effective enforcer.

Another solution to this issue of secret money is to require corporations to publicly disclose their political spending. This would mean that corporations could no longer secretly donate to “social welfare” nonprofit organizations or trade associations like the Chamber to effectively lobby on their behalf. Because few corporations are likely to choose transparency of their own accord, the Corporate Reform Coalition works to persuade shareholders of publicly-owned corporations to vote in favor of disclosure requirements at shareholder meetings. The coalition also advocates for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to finish a rulemaking requiring corporate political spending disclosure at the federal level.

Last but not least, the option exists to confront the problem of secret money at its roots: the Citizens United decision and other Supreme Court decisions that have given rise to our campaign finance system. The Democracy Is For People campaign is a people’s movement calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and related rulings that undermine our democracy.

There is no shortage of solutions to keep organizations like the U.S. Chamber from allowing the flow of political information in our country to be dominated by the interests of the extremely wealthy through secret money. Congress and the administration should work quickly to address this blatant affront to democracy. Voters need to be in control of our democracy, and that means having all of the information about who is trying to influence their vote, not allowing billionaires to pull strings while hiding in the shadows.

Do you know who owns the corner store in your neighborhood? How about the local plumber or woodworking business? Almost certainly, the answer is that the founders of these small businesses are the owners, and they receive the money that they make in revenue. In a lot of cases, though, it’s not nearly that obvious or transparent—and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would like to keep it that way.

Presently, companies are not required by federal law to disclose their “beneficial owner”— the real person who exercises control over the operations of the company or who ultimately receives the substantial economic benefits of the company. Right now, most states require more information to check out a library book than to start a corporation. And states allow corporate formation agents to fill out paperwork on behalf of secret clients, and even let shell companies form additional secret corporations like Russian nesting dolls of anonymity. The Panama Papers and Paradise Papers showed how secret companies are a global problem, but the problem is not exclusive to tropical getaways– the U.S. is a major enabler of corporate secrecy.

This lack of corporate transparency has some troubling implications. For one, nondisclosure of beneficial ownership can be a key enabler of money laundering as well as other secretive funding of criminal activities including terrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. In short, the more difficult it is for authorities to track where and to whom money is flowing, and who owns particular assets, the easier it is for global and domestic bad actors to get away with criminal activity. In the United States, these anonymous shell companies have been used by criminals to carry out Medicare fraud, arms trafficking, and cheating people out of their savings using fraudulent investment schemes, all shielded from the prying eyes of law enforcement officials. So why does the Chamber oppose efforts to change federal laws mandating disclosure of beneficial ownership? According to the Chamber’s own testimony, “The Chamber and its members are committed to fighting criminals, terrorists, foreign powers, money launderers and any others who would misuse the U.S. financial system to carry out illicit schemes that harm our nation.”

But the testimony proceeded to argue that mandated disclosure of beneficial ownership is supposedly a misguided, flawed way to do that. This disclosure policy, the Chamber argues, would be “overly broad” and “unworkable” and would supposedly cause too much harm to law abiding small and medium-sized businesses.

This runs directly counter to polling of small businesses that shows strong support in favor of disclosure of beneficial ownership. And, the Chamber is putting forward flawed arguments. For one, the Chamber’s concerns that law abiding business owners would have their privacy invaded by disclosure mandates is dishonest; information the Chamber mentions, such as driver’s license numbers, would not be public domain. This information would not be released for everyone’s access, it would simply be disclosed to authorities. Second, the Chamber raises the possibility that good faith mistakes in filing the required paperwork would lead to innocent business owners being punished—but existing proposals for mandated beneficial ownership disclosure make clear that errors will only be punished if they are done “knowingly” and “willfully” (i.e. fraudulently). These proposals would hardly place an unbearable burden on legitimate businesses.

Besides, the kinds of businesses the Chamber worries would be collateral are not the kinds of companies that proposals for mandated beneficial ownership disclosure target. “Real” companies with lots of employees, shareholders, and profits are exempt from, for instance, the TITLE Act, as are companies that are registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

These spurious arguments on behalf of the Chamber raise serious questions about why the trade association wants to keep this information out of the hands of law enforcement officials. Certainly, very wealthy CEOs like the executives of the Chamber’s member companies may be exactly the sort of people using shell companies to hide assets to avoid having to pay taxes on assets the federal government does not know about. The classic image we have of “tax evasion” is of money stashed in a bank in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, but the reality is that current beneficial ownership laws make it shockingly easy for the wealthy to create anonymous shell companies to hide their assets wherever they want to.

Furthermore, the right-wing organization American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has openly stated that its own opposition to beneficial ownership disclosure proposals is to protect the ability for extremely wealthy donors to influence elections and policymaking with secret money. ALEC claims that such proposals would “mak[e] it easier to attack supporters of viewpoints that are not politically correct or popular with the mainstream media”—in other words, the right-wing viewpoints of ALEC’s membership. The Chamber has extensive ties to ALEC, having sat on many of ALEC’s task forces and having pursued much of the same policy agenda. It’s likely that the similarly right-wing Chamber holds views on beneficial ownership disclosure laws as it relates to secret influence of elections similar to its friends at ALEC.

The Chamber claims to support efforts to stop human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism, money laundering and other crimes. But by opposing corporate beneficial ownership disclosure proposals, it ultimately stands in the way of those efforts. The Chamber may publicly claim that it’s just acting out of concern for law-abiding small businesses, but closer scrutiny reveals that their true rationale might be slightly less innocent than that.

Previously, we have explored the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s extremely partisan, secretive approach to election spending. Under CEO Tom Donohue, in the 2016 elections, the Chamber spent nearly $30 million, 100 percent of which went to benefit Republican candidates. Among groups that do not disclose their donors, the Chamber was the second largest spender in the 2016 elections (after the National Rifle Association). Along with its spending habits, the Chamber’s staffing also tells a story of how wildly partisan the organization is. This is of course very different than the wide-ranging perspectives of the Main Street businesses the Chamber purports to represent, which represent every political stripe and ideological bent in the nation.

In a new report, Public Citizen analyzed a database of 157 current and former Chamber employees who previously held jobs that could be characterized as partisan in nature, such as working for an elected official or an outside group with a strong ideological bent. Of these, more than 90 percent worked for Republican or conservative entities, and fewer than 10 percent for Democratic or liberal entities. These Chamber employees worked for 72 GOP members of the U.S. House and 47 GOP U.S. senators.

We tallied 73 different right-leaning entities that have fed employees to the Chamber, including Republican White Houses and cabinet secretaries, the Republican National Committee, right-leaning political action committees, conservative media, and Republican members of Congress.

Republican or conservative entities for which U.S. Chamber employees have worked include such familiar names as Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and other Koch brothers groups, and the NRA, as seen in this map:

For comparison’s sake, here is the much less busy map of Democratic or liberal entities for which U.S. Chamber employees have worked:

Given this lopsided, tangled web of associations with conservative actors, it is safe to conclude that the Chamber is not an apolitical organization looking out for your local mom-and-pop stores, as it masquerades. Instead, what the Chamber advocates is usually the preferred policies of the Republican Party and those in its sphere. And indeed, the Chamber’s activity has lined up with the GOP’s legislative agenda with uncanny frequency.

At U.S. Chamber Watch, we work to draw attention to the fact that the U.S. Chamber is behaving in a partisan manner and focused on dismantling the public protections that small businesses (and regular Americans) need.

One important way to do this is to ensure that the many companies that fund the Chamber understand what they stand for. Many have consumer-facing brands, and need to be conscious of their PR and public associations. These brand-sensitive companies would never want anyone to think of them as supporting the Koch brothers or undercutting climate change, worker health, and financial safety policies.

We aren’t naïve, and we don’t expect these companies to make decisions solely out of the goodness of their hearts. But what they should do is recognize the partisanship of the Chamber and the danger it could pose to their bottom lines. They know that their ideologically diverse customer bases may abandon their brands if their ties to such a partisan organization are discovered. These companies should stop funding the Chamber.

The revolving door of staffers from the GOP to the Chamber of Commerce is yet more evidence that it is not actually a trade group benignly representing business interests as it claims to be, but rather a partisan organization pushing for a conservative agenda. You can read our full report, titled “The Chamber of Partisanship: An Investigation into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Dense Web of Political Connections” here.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue gave his “State of the American Business” address yesterday, signaling that the trade association and the nation’s largest lobby spender couldn’t be happier about benefits that were handed out to Big Business over the past year, which included record Wall Street profits and a massive tax giveaway.

Unfortunately, many of those gains did not reach Main Street and won’t. And, even though Donahue himself admitted that “the prosperity hasn’t flowed to every community or every household,” he remained undeterred in touting discredited “trickle down” economic theories. His address featured a laundry list of anti-consumer priorities for 2018 that are geared toward maximizing big business’s profits at the expense of public safety and health.

Donahue gushed both about last year’s massive tax giveaway for the wealthiest, as well as the Trump administration’s commitment to undo critical health and safety regulations in order increase corporate profits. The tax handouts for corporations will be paid for by cuts to critical government services like Medicaid, education, and nutrition programs leaving hard working U.S. families decidedly worse off. The push to deregulate and undo our nation’s public safeguards will lead to more tainted food, dangerous products, and unsafe medicines—outcomes that will harm or even kill Americans.

If cutting services that help everyday people in order to pay for tax cuts for profitable corporations and gutting health and safety regulations weren’t enough of “achievements” for the Chamber, it is urging Congress to make massive cuts to the nation’s safety net benefit programs moving forward, which could gravely impact millions of older and underprivileged Americans. And the Chamber is gearing up its fight to help corporations combat shareholders resolutions that give shareholders a say in the management of the companies they invest in and increase transparency in those companies.

In addition, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform will continue to work to limit a person’s right to their day in court—benefitting big banks, insurance companies, and massive corporations that seek to close the courthouse doors on consumers who have been defrauded, cheated, or ripped off.

To accomplish all of this, the Chamber is doubling down on siding with Wall Street over Main Street by aggressively recruiting candidates for political office who promise to work on behalf of their overly partisan, Big Business-enriching goals.

Unlike most fair-minded Americans, the Chamber is devotedly against the principle that America succeeds when everyone succeeds, and instead leaves its faith in the failed theory that when “pro-growth agenda succeeds, America succeeds.” Instead of asking what policies will directly help working families, the Chamber continues to pursue policies that limit our access to courts, curtail health and safety regulations, advance trade policies that harm American workers, and side with corporations over investors.

Donohue firmly believes that the “state of American businesses” is strong. Unfortunately, it is at the expense of hardworking Americans and their families.

If there was any doubt left in our mind (there wasn’t) that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is at the helm of the Trump administration’s sinking ship, the House Republicans’ budget proposal, released yesterday, certainly cleared that up. The “Building a Better America” budget proposal calls for significant cuts to public services while giving major tax handouts to the wealthy. While the budget seems to make cuts across all portfolios, there are three particular ones in which the Chamber is well versed in deregulating: financial reform, the safety net, medical malpractice reforms, and tax reform.

“Building a Better America” assumes adoption of the Financial CHOICE Act, a sweeping Wall Street deregulation bill that the Chamber has been lobbying in support of. The CHOICE Act (or as we like to call it, the “Wrong Choice Act”) would cripple the CFPB, something the Chamber has longed to destroy since it first came to be. What does the Chamber have against the CFPB? Easy. The CFBP works to protect consumers from unsavory and sometimes illegal behavior by the big financial institutions, many of which the Chamber represents. The CHOICE Act also repeals the Volcker Rule, a piece of legislation the Chamber loves to hate. The Volcker Rule ensures that banks refrain from engaging in speculative trading with investors’ money and brings them back to the regular business of banking, which reduces the chance of repeating the 2007 financial crisis. Much like with the rest of the CHOICE Act, the Chamber and the Big Banks are anti-Volcker Rule because it confines Wall Street’s ability to make short term profits that become big bonuses for executives.

Next up, the safety net. The Chamber has a long history of aggressively lobbying against Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The budget proposal would cut funding for Medicare by $487 billion over 10 years, while also cutting Medicaid and other health care programs by $1.5 trillion over the same amount of time. Unlike President Trump, the Chamber has never promised to spare Social Security from cuts. One specific cut to social security that the budget proposes is Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), something the Chamber has long tried to reform. The House budget contains $4 billion worth of cuts to social security, and while these cuts may be music to the Chamber’s ears, it is a devastating proposal for the average American.

Republicans would be remiss to pass up the opportunity to make outlandish claims regarding the practice of defensive medicine. The proposal includes “reforms” outlined in the “Protecting Access to Care Act of 2017,” a bill the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform lobbied heavily on behalf of. The Chamber and its health care lobby allies assert preposterous estimates on the prevalence of defensive medicine and the costs incurred by it, despite those claims being debunked. The budget seeks to restrict patients’ rights in an effort to do the bidding of the health care lobby, something the Chamber is familiar with.

Lastly, tax reform. The tax reform proposals championed by the Chamber and largely adopted in the proposed House budget are made up of comprehensive tax giveaway to the wealthy and a payback scheme for the Chamber’s big business allies. The Chamber has said before of tax reform that it “will be at the table throughout the process—because anyone who isn’t at the table risks ending up on the menu.” And, based on this budget, they weren’t joking around. The House Republican budget calls for lowering the corporate tax rate and downplays the importance of the tax, given that it “actually raises relatively little revenue.” The Chamber has long championedreducing the tax rate on business income. And while conservative rhetoric may try to push the narrative that taxing corporations raises little revenue, the truth is that the Chamber/Trump/GOP tax reform proposal could cost as much as an estimated $7.8 trillion over ten years, disproportionately benefitting high-income households.

The House budget proposal is nothing more than a Chamber-dreamed windfall for corporations and Wall Street. Building a Better America or Building a Better Corporate America? Based on what we see in this budget blueprint, it is evident which the Chamber has been lobbying for.

Just before Congress escaped town for the Fourth of July recess, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee released its draft fiscal year 2018 Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) Appropriations bill. The FSGG appropriations bill provides annual funding for the U.S. Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and many other important agencies.

This year, however, the bill is packed chock full of ideological policy riders that have nothing to with funding the agencies the bill is supposed to provide for, and everything to do with pleasing the House majority’s corporate masters at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. By tucking these policy riders into must-pass legislation, the House leadership ensures that they have a better chance of becoming law than they would if they were forced to stand on their own (highly dubious) merits.

It may be the Fourth of July holiday week, but the release of the draft FSGG appropriations bill is likely to have been celebrated like Christmas in July in the marble hallways of the Chamber. The draft bill provides the Chamber with a veritable avalanche of presents, probably in response to the avalanche of money the Chamber has bestowed upon GOP candidates for Congress.

The biggest gift of all to the Chamber is the provision of the draft bill that would prevent the SEC from developing a rule that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending to investors, including donations to politically active trade associations like the Chamber. The secrecy-obsessed Chamber has long lobbiedagainst such a rule. It has even reached out to member companies to urge them against voluntarily disclosing such information despite the fact that more than 1.2 million investors (retail and institutional) and members of the public have called for it.

If the policy rider prohibiting the development of a political spending disclosure rule qualifies as the proverbial new car in the garage on Christmas morning, then the rider eliminating the financial independence of the CFPB qualifies as the proverbial first class tickets to Paris for the Chamber and its friends on Wall Street. Fighting the existence of a strong, independent CFPB has been a lodestar for the Chamber. Why does the Chamber hate the CFPB so much? Probably because the CFBP is doing its job, working to protect consumers from unscrupulous and sometimes illegal behavior by the big financial institutions whose interests the Chamber represents. Indeed, the CFPB has obtained $11.8 billion in relief for over 29 million consumers. That’s $11.8 billion that wasn’t available for executive bonuses and stock buy-backs.

Unfortunately, bringing the CFPB under the heal of the very politicians who are most dependent upon corporate cash for their reelections isn’t the only policy rider in the draft FSGG appropriations bill that’s a giveaway to the Chamber’s Wall Street patrons. The draft bill contains a separate rider that would repeal the Volcker Rule. The Volcker Rule prevents banks from engaging in speculative trading with depositors’ money, thereby reducing the chances of another financial crisis. Of course, the Chamber and the Big Banks don’t like the Volcker Rule because it limits Wall Street’s ability to make short term profits that in turn produce big bonuses for executives.

As if all this weren’t enough, the draft FSGG appropriations bill contains another yuge gift for the Chamber and its financial services industry backers. The draft bill contains a rider which would halt a CFPB rule restricting the use of forced arbitration clauses buried in the fine print of consumer financial contracts. The Chamber has long campaigned against limits on this “rip-off” clause. Blocking this rule would essentially allow corporations to rip off consumers with impunity, as the Wells Fargo fake account scandal litigation has shown.

While it is undoubtedly depressing that our elected officials, who are supposed to represent the people, are instead finding new and ever more creative opportunities to shower gifts on their corporate benefactors, we still have time to make our voices heard. The House FSGG appropriations bill hasn’t yet passed through the full appropriations committee. So call your congressperson and tell him or her that you object to all of these harmful policy riders whose only purpose is to please the Chamber and the giant corporations intent upon buying our democracy.

Because if we don’t stand up and make our voices heard, then they very well may wind up singing some rather special Christmas carols at the Chamber this summer.

ince the beginning of the debate around passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has worked to undermine efforts to expand access to healthcare for tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans.

In just 15 months between 2009 and 2010, the Chamber spent more than $102 million dollars, funneled to it by the big health insurers, on opposing the ACA. Fast forward to 2017, and we see that the Chamber has far from given up its crusade against the ACA, and recently urged the House to pass the American Health Care Act (AHCA) which would repeal the ACA. If the ACA were repealed, it would likely result in 23 million Americans losing their health insurance and would weaken a host of important protections such as the requirement that health insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Now, with 13 Republican senators crafting a Senate version of the AHCA in secret, we wanted to see to what level the Chamber has the ear of these powerful senators. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the Chamber, the largest non-disclosing outside spender in 2016 congressional races, spent more than $16 million between 2012 and 2016 supporting the campaigns of ten of the 13 senators authoring the bill.

MONEY SPENT BY U.S. CHAMBER TO SUPPORT SENATE HEALTH CARE BILL AUTHORS

SENATOR

MONEY SPENT BY CHAMBER, 2012-2016

LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-TN)

$1,000

MIKE LEE (R-UT)

$1,000

JOHN THUNE (R-SD)

$3,500

TOM COTTON (R-AR)

$5,000

JOHN CORNYN (R-TX)

$7,500

ORRIN HATCH (R-UT)

$95, 140

MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY)

$1, 579, 620

CORY GARDNER (R-CO)

$3, 734, 275

ROB PORTMAN (R-OH)

$4, 616, 326

PAT TOOMEY (R-PA)

$6, 116, 150

TOTAL

$16, 159, 511

(Senate authors of the secret healthcare bill that were not supported by the Chamber are Cruz, Enzi, and Barrasso)

With powerful special interests groups like the Chamber spending eye-popping sums of money to elect some of these senators, is it any wonder that reports about the secret senate Republican plans for health care reform show that like the House version, it will prioritize the interests of the big health insurers over those of the American people? The Chamber’s longstanding opposition to the ACA and its support of the AHCA are just another example of the trade group putting profits before people.

How would you react if we told you that popular brands such as Disney, Pepsi, and Gap were funding the Trump agenda? That your hard-earned money was going to support Steve Bannon’s dreamed of “deconstruction of the administrative state” which would wipe away a whole host of public protections?

Surprised? Upset? Angry?

Sorry, but it’s true. You see, it turns out that Disney, Pepsi, and Gap all fund Washington’s most powerful lobbying group, a group that is the driving force behind much of the Trump/GOP agenda.

Which group is that? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber, backed by nearly $275 million in corporate money, is Washington’s proverbial 800 pound gorilla. On issues as diverse as climate, clean air, clean water, fossil fuel production and pipelines, worker safety, financial regulation, net neutrality, healthcare, overtime pay, and deregulation in general, Trump and the GOP are ripping entire pages from the Chamber’s playbook.

Here at Public Citizen’s Chamber Watch project, we wanted to know which companies were funding the Chamber/Trump agenda, and we were particularly interested to know if companies that have made public commitments on climate, sustainability, clean water, and public health were funding the Chamber despite its long history of anti-climate, anti-environmental, pro-tobacco advocacy.

Based on our review of publicly-available information as well as conversations with company officials, we learned that many companies that have – at least on paper – good policies on climate, sustainability, and/or public health are still funding the Chamber.

And Disney, Pepsi, and Gap are among these companies.

Today, a diverse coalition of more than 50 groups in more than a dozen countries asks Disney, Gap, and Pepsi to stop funding a trade association that works against the environmental and public health policies these corporations claim to support. After all, how can we take these companies’ commitments on climate and public health seriously when they financially support an organization that is one of the lead plaintiffs against the Clean Power Plan, constantly lobbies for the fossil fuel industry, and lobbies in dozens of countries against anti-smoking laws and regulations?

Already, companies such as Apple and Pacific Gas & Electric have left the Chamber due to the Chamber’s anti-climate advocacy, and CVS left as a result of the Chamber’s pro-tobacco work. It is time for Disney, Pepsi, and Gap to do the same. To continue to fund the Chamber would be to render meaningless the positive steps these companies have taken on climate and/or tobacco.

What’s more, continued support of the Chamber poses a significant reputational risk to these companies, one that should concern their shareholders. Not only does membership in the Chamber render them complicit in the Chamber’s anti-climate and pro-tobacco advocacy, it also associates them with an explicitly partisan group.

In 2016, the Chamber formed an alliance with leading Republican luminaries to “Save the Senate” for the GOP. The Chamber ultimately wound up spending almost $30 million in dark money on congressional races, more than any other group that doesn’t disclose its donors. All of this money benefited Republican candidates.

Like all companies, Disney, Pepsi, and Gap have ideologically diverse customer bases, and presumably many of their customers would be angry to learn that companies they patronize are supporting such a partisan group. In an era when more and more consumers are linking their purchasing decisions to a company’s political activities, it is especially risky for brands like Disney, Pepsi, and Gap to associate themselves with a hyper-partisan group such as the Chamber that is one of the architects of the Trump agenda.

The Chamber’s agenda is bad for both public health and the health of the planet and its secret money partisan political spending is bad for the health of a transparent democracy. The time has come for Disney, Pepsi, and Gap to drop the Chamber.